What else can one say about Ben Franklin? Quite a lot, I’ve found. Nick Bunker’s new biography is an astute, informative and thorough delight, and I’m pleased to have had the opportunity to interview him. I had much more to address and ask about (Franklin’s remarkable ancestry, his inventions, his discoveries with the Leiden jar …
David: I can’t tell you how delighted I was to discover Orson Welles and Roger Hill: A Friendship in Three Acts. You had me at…ahem…Hill and O. It’s mentioned in Patrick McGilligan’s astute Young Orson biography, which is quite an honor. Unlike the transcript-style This is Orson Welles and My Lunches With Orson, your book …
According to the late dictator Fidel Castro, the Revolución Cubana’s legacy was almost blameless, constructive, justifiably defiant and positively epochal rather than dystopian and fated for failure. However, besides ever-intrusive government, the quest for mass social justice requires drastic actions, so it’s easy to find Fidel’s denials of civil-rights abuses, executions and intolerance incredible. On …
